The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967–1973. The USSR’s Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict

THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973

were already ... used to other standards in hotels. I was tasked to announce this to the mili-

tary liaison, Lt-Col. Bardisi. He declared that the Soviet experts had always lived in this

hotel, and were satisfied. I told him that we were not experts but advisers, and this should

be internalized. ... He offered to move me and Gen. Katyshkin to another hotel, but we

refused to go without the others.^60

Either standards at the Victoria were quickly improved, or the lower-ranking advis-
ers were less demanding. Lt-Col. Vladimir Serkov arrived on 24 November and spent
two weeks at the hotel before taking up his post as adviser to the headquarters of the
2nd Infantry Division, II Army Corps, at Ismailia. His precise and revealing journal,
published forty years later in his remote Ural Mountains hometown with a print run
of 150 copies, mentions no dissatisfaction with the lodgings.^61 Meanwhile, additional
groups were arriving in rapid succession. A first group of thirteen new naval advisers
came on 2 November, headed by Vice-Admiral Boris Sutyagin, who became chief
adviser to the commander of the Eg yptian Navy. One of his subordinates, then-Capt.
Vitaly Zub, states that their number ultimately reached more than seventy. An adviser
was attached to every flotilla commander—Zub was the senior adviser to a “brigade”
of nine destroyers and frigates—and, eventually, they were posted on board most
individual ships.^62
Though Sokolov’s agreement was never published, subsequent references indicate
that the Soviets won their main stipulation: ensuring the advisers’ authority at the
field echelon and their direct access to the Eg yptian troops. As explained to Party
cadres at home, the Soviet side had insisted on this point to prevent misuse of Soviet
weaponry and a repetition of its wholesale loss in the June war. “In October or
November 1967,” a former nomenklatura member from Vilnius recalled, a lieutenant-
general had given a lecture to the partaktiv (i.e., assembly of activists) of the
Lithuanian Communist Party’s Central Committee:

He said that up to the Six-Day War, Nasser had not allowed Soviet experts into his army,

preferring to send his own officers to study at Soviet military academies. But now the

Eg yptians had been persuaded to post an expert at each battalion; no expert, no arms.

Moscow, however, set its target at deploying advisers down to company level, because “that

way we can exert complete control over the Eg yptian Army.”^63

A senior Soviet interpreter posted to Eg ypt claims that Nasser was compelled to
accept advisers down to the squad level.^64 As their number never approached the
figure that would be necessary for such saturation, this must refer to their new clear-
ance to work directly with the smallest field units. In the various land formations,
advisers’ memoirs and captured Eg yptian documents agree that the standard was four
to five per brigade, with only one interpreter for them all—a shortage that would
soon be felt acutely. At division headquarters, the linguists were not quite so thinly
stretched, with three of them for seven advisers.^65